Inspiring New Possibilities, Living From the Soul of Life While Co-creating Well Being of Body, Being, Heart and Planet….One Breath At A Time
Soul Musings is a 31-day practice for the month of December immersed in deep listening to what is emerging and unfolding day by day. Eight sentences with occasional resources to explore more deeply.
Each post, invited by Soul, allows the words to emerge unscathed from prior planning, editing, or censorship. Dwelling in uncertainty and dipping a toe into mystery this union of words is an attempt to resonate within an innate way of Being…. returning “home”.
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OK, I know many of us got sucked into the fairy tales that we were told as young girls and boys. Some of them had good things to teach us….and others lead to belief systems into adulthood that caught us in patterns which were not necessarily the healthiest for our whole being. Many of these tales had the feminine as helpless and/or in a precarious situation so that masculine needed to save her (read rescue here)….and invariably he became captivated by her beauty (perhaps the beginning of a need for make up and designer clothing?)
A few weeks back I was at a gathering of artists (writers, painters, singers, photographers…..) and we were asked to think of a pattern that we would like to let go of and then capture the image/words on paper with pen/colored marker/crayon/paint so that we could share it with the others. This was just the beginning of the ritual.
Immediately I saw a scene similar to the one above (you will of course remember “Rupunzel, Rupunzel let down your hair”) however, instead of the masculine presence climbing up my hair to rescue me from the tower that had no way out I saw him riding the white horse across the plains as I screamed “Help! Help! (kind of like Scarlet O’Hara with Rhett Butler or the damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks).
No, my horse did not look like this…..
Well, my first thought was “I can’t draw!”, but decided right then and there that I would not ask for a way out of this exercise, but instead picked up colored felt tipped pens and started in on my masterpiece. Now if you put a group of drawings by a kindergarten class up on the wall let’s just say mine would fit right in. BUT, I actually had fun doing it and laughed all the way through my creation. (you should have seen the horse!!)
Believe it or not the other members of the group did get what I had drawn when I shared and before the end of the evening was over with we had all gone outside, stood around a fire and tossed our out lived and no longer needed patterns into the flames.
It was very curious to me that this is the pattern that showed up as I pride myself on being such an “independent women”, but when I really got down to it I realized that this pattern has lasted a very long time. It actually has many levels to it including taking the role of the rescuer as well. (switch the picture above in your mind and place a beautiful woman with her heart in her hand (no sword baby!) taking off to rescue everyone she can possibly “save”, but leaving her own needs somewhere behind on the road she is traveling.)
To keep this simple though let’s talk about the one being rescued.
As I see it there is a “light” and “dark” side to the “rescue syndrome”. The light is when we graciously accept help when needed and then use it as a springboard for making distinctions and opening to possibility. Granted there are times in life when we need someone to be there for us and it is an act of self love to allow that person/s to help us. Just like being able to give and receive love with equal ease.
Now for the dark side of this pattern. For me I saw it manifest a great deal in the financial realm oftentimes cleverly disguised in credit card use, asking for (or accepting from self identified “rescuer’s”) personal loans, and oh yes taking jobs that did not honor who I was in my fullest expression or promoting other people’s businesses/visions – all at the expense of trusting my own.
In younger years the rescue came in the need to be loved, desired, accepted and to belong and often came in the form of relationship. In more mature years that is still present under the surface, but it goes much deeper – honoring the potential of my own being in fullest expression, creativity and soul purpose. Trusting that I have all that it takes to be successful in whatever endeavor I take on whether it be a business, artistic expression, relationship or spiritual quest.
This means a weaving of the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine – versus the Doubtful and Disempowered Feminine with the Static Masculine. This tapestry happens inside of us and then is reflected in the outside circumstances and relationships of our lives.
No longer able to walk away from ourselves we instead turn back to face ourselves and take a really close look at the magnificent being that we are.
It may take time to integrate all of the parts, and there may be times when we are about to fall into the “rescue syndrome” once again….but I am willing to bet that once you have seen who you are and the potential that you have there will be no turning back!
Gaye Abbott, RYT assists individuals to drop the layers that cover the natural innate blueprint we came in with and reveal, through a combination of evolutionary energy work, Jin Shin Jyutus, Reiki, mentoring, yoga therapy and breath re-patterning, the larger purpose and co-creative expression that we are here for.
For those interested in receiving private sessions please contact Gaye at: JoyfulGaye@NaturalPassages.com. Travel to your location in the U.S. or globally is available. Please inquire. Skype: gaye.abbott
“The essential issue we face in life is being connected – not being in control” Margaret Wheatley
Isn’t it when we develop the capacity to meet whatever life serves up, to truly connect with the moment to moment experience of it, that we fall into allowing life to expand and enrich us? Each of us knows what that feels like as women. Whether it be giving birth to a child, preparing and serving food with love, standing on the front lines of something we strongly believe in and taking action, or even the simple act of breathing in the beauty of nature.
Our present global awakening is the first time in the history of humans that we are aware we can cause our own extinction. Along with that come the opportunities to be part of the shift to change into sustainable systems that have interconnection and global well being at the forefront.
It is women who will contribute greatly to this global evolution bringing the feminine principles back into activation. We shall also be partnered with the millions of men globally who will remember that it is not control and power that will sustain us, but instead collaboration, co-creation and cooperation.
“Aliveness is the sense of really being present; sensory awareness, emotional awareness, conscious awareness. The more aliveness we can handle, the more available we are to the flow of life within us.” Victoria Castle from The Trance of Scarcity
It is when we remember and live from our oneness that we can enter into co-creation from a Source level. What does that feel like and look like? Here are some A,B,C’s…
*Absolute awareness and acceptance of our purpose in life
*Belonging – Remembering that we are born with an inseparable experience of innately belonging
*Collaboration and co-creation with others. This is about connection – not having to do it alone! Courage!
*Daring – To be yourself outrageously and wildly. There is no box! This is all a creation from the river that flows within you connected with points in the evolutionary unified field.
Find yourself in all of this and don’t be afraid. This evolution needs you as a embodied whole woman who does not ever need to stand alone. Beautiful one you are always helped and supported by the unseen but tenderly felt sources of deep interconnection. Remember….
Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
With the most recent devastation in Japan (and New Zealand not long ago) showing us how small our global village is, and the deep interconnectedness that pervades everything – we as women have before us a task that is of the utmost importance.
We MUST step up and into our knowing, be willing to learn new skills, and not be afraid to speak our truth and follow that with action. This will often “upset the apple cart” of traditions and what has gone before (mindsets), yet we all know that many of the structures across the board that have been laid down are not sustainable, and haven’t been for a long time.
For example, our home -the earth – in no uncertain terms, is letting us know that new sustainable working solutions need to be created, implemented, and honored as the way that will connect our global village in peaceful and creative relationship/partnership. We all want to survive…but even more to thrive.
I believe that everyone holds a key to creating the shift that is presently sweeping our planet to a more sustainable, socially and culturally just, and empowering world. We can either fight against the changes, hide our face under the covers, or we can ride the wave with determination, purpose, and surrender.
It takes both you see, for it is in the determination and purpose that we commit to – whatever our passion and free expression is – and it is in the surrender or deep letting go, that we find the paths and solutions/resolutions that have been right before us all along. It is here that our most ingenious and committed creations happen. However, this also means that we first have to take the best care of our own beings in order to be sustainable ourselves.
As a long time supporter for Women For Women International I have been aware for a long time that women are at the forefront of global change by first empowering themselves and each other, then their families and communities. Here is another example I came across recently reflecting this stepping up.
In the far away village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India, where few tourists ever wander, an experiment has begun to bear fruit globally. Established in 1972, the Barefoot College is a non-government organization that has been providing basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable.
This village is situated in arid land where water is scarce and poverty rampant. Here is what Sathya Saran says about women in this village:
“The women of the village work together with their menfolk towards sustainable development, and also help educate and inspire those in nearby villages to rise above the vagaries of nature and their hardships by effort and education.
Tolonia’s most famous export is the solar engineer concept. Making the most of the abundant sunshine, the Barefoot College has trained its women to set up solar electrified systems that can provide light and power to entire villages. In fact, the 80,000 square foot campus of the Barefoot College is electrified and maintained by the women solar engineers, most of whom have little or no formal education and live within the broad dictates of a rural, feudal, chauvinistic, male-dominated social milieu.
The women engineers are trained to create everything such a unit needs, to help install and run it, and to train the villagers of the receiving village to maintain and run the units themselves.
Going a step further, the Barefoot College also trains women from many other parts of the world to create this cheap, endurable and sustainable source of alternate energy, and how to take it in working condition to their respective villages.
Language and regional differences are forgotten in the giving and taking of knowledge so vital to better living. Women’s empowerment finds new meaning, as Tilonia’s solar-energy-giving-women help light lives across the world. “
These ‘Barefoot solutions’ can be broadly categorized into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development.
So far, the Barefoot approach has been replicated in 17 states of India, 15 countries in Africa, 2 countries in Asia and 1 country in South America.
Barefoot Approach and its objectives:
*Provide sustainable solutions to improve the quality of life in poor, rural communities
*Reduce migration by generating employment within villages
*Provide vocational training to semi-literate and illiterate men and women through the process of learning-by-doing
*Reduce drudgery of rural women and girls by providing them access to education, vocational training, health care etc.
*Empower rural women socially, economically and politically
*Encourage community based, owned and managed initiatives
*Demystify technologies and decentralize their uses to improve their quality of living
*Use and promote traditional knowledge and skills that have been passed on through generations
Dr. Bunker Roy, the creator of Barefoot College, answers this question in an interview on Empowering Rural Women:
What do you think needs to be done by the Indian government to make the environment more enabling for enterprises such as yours? Between 2004 and 2009, the Barefoot approach of training illiterate rural women to solar electrify their villages was extended to Africa. By this year, more than 100 semi-literate and illiterate grandmothers from 21 countries in Africa will have solar electrified their own villages. Under a unique scheme called ITEC, the Indian government has covered the air tickets and six months’ training costs to each of these grandmothers to come to India. What the Barefoot College has effectively demonstrated is how sustainable the combination of traditional knowledge and demystified modern skills can be when the tools are in the hands of the rural poor. Our message has reached the far corners of the globe. The respect our community has for the Sun (solar electrification) is really a simple message which is easily replicable in inaccessible, neglected and backward communities all over the world.
For more of this interview go to: http://gulfnews.com/news/world/india/empowering-rural-women-1.635403
This is just one of 1,000’s of efforts across the globe in which women hold a pivotal and vital role. This is also where men and women can come together in equality and work on behalf of the betterment for all.
In one of my favorite stories, Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz stepped up over and over again in spite of her fears, and at the very end found that the bucket of water right in front of her was the key to melting her biggest fear embodied in the “Wicked Witch”.
Curiosity, willingness to engage and collaborate, and perceiving ourselves as an active participant with something to offer will pave the way. I wonder what is right in front of us that will potentiate our coming out of hiding and stepping up?? Don’t forget, it can be simple….
“In a world where everything is sexualized instead of humanized, I worry that we’ve lost touch with the sweet eroticism in life. To me, being human, life itself is erotic. It’s a being alive to the magical, pulsating, ecstatic body and universe we live and experience through. It’s a way of being in the world in a sensory and tactile way, leading and relating to others with your energy awareness and senses.
…in its highest sense, our sexuality is a gateway to spirit, to the place where humanity meets divinity, and as such it is sacred. It offers us a readily available opportunity to experience the ecstatic union we all long for. If… that is… we dare surrender so deeply to the erotic dance, with ourselves, with each other.”
Starting off with this quote sets the stage for the focus of this post, as the Divine Feminine is coming full force into our awareness across the globe. There is a reason for that. Our planet needs us to re-balance – and quickly! Yet, what exactly is the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Principle to you?
For women and men this is where humanity meets Divinity – the ecstatic union of the
interconnection that plays out constantly – seen and unseen, felt and not felt. It is about collaboration, connection, listening, and flow. There is an immense intelligence in life that is begging us to pay attention. It can be seen and felt all around us if we will only pay attention. A friend of mine in the UK found this in nature on one of his daily walks. This spiral serpent encased in ice can also be seen as this erotic dance that is being played out in a very elemental way.
Bringing the Shakti energy back to the drawing table of life in our present time means that each of us as women (and men) are being invited to step up to the plate of our lives, heal whatever needs healing within ourselves, and be sensuously present to life as an “erotic sacred dance”.
Someone who invited this dance to play out in her life was Georgia O’Keefe, and it wasn’t always an easy path for her to take. Her statement, “I have been absolutely terrified my entire life, and I have never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do”, challenges us to live our lives from the inner urgings, that if not heeded leave us living half of a life instead of the whole one we were meant to play out.
As women, when we walk into a room, into a new situation, or launch an innovative creation we can embody this energy by being fully in our belly – our pelvis – and of course do this with grounded passionate presence. This sensory way of being in the deepest feminine parts of ourselves creates an opportunity to confidently stride into the moments of our lives because we courageously trust that we will always have the wholeness of who we are – and no one can take that away from us.
When we understand that we no longer need to puff up our chests and be “strong” in a masculine energy sort of way, make prose more important than poetic, or come from logic and rational left brained thinking to be taken seriously….. leaving our deepest feminine parts behind on the shelf in a dark room….then we will be heard, seen, and acknowledged for the gifts that we bring – and the Earth that gives us life will breathe a huge sigh of relief!
Shiva/Shakti
It is the Divine erotic dance between masculine and feminine energy inside and outside each of us (we are literally surrounded by it!) that keeps life juicy, creative, and leads to a gateway of embodied sensual living from body, mind, heart and soul.
Discover the pathways of erotic living this week that you are already embodying, or can surrender into more, and ignite in your body, heart and soul. Make love to life….your life!
on How to Increase your Personal Presence, Financial Flow, and Make a Greater Impact on those around you with the Power of your “Feminine.”. This is #2 in a series of 4 – Great!
Facebook is a multifaceted animal these days. You can get lost in the endless postings that come through your home page, or in many cases can connect with like minded souls that inspire and create greater awareness, shifts, laughter, joy and community. It was this latter path that took me to Gay Hendricks page on A Manifesto for Conscious Men. He and Arjuna Ardajh have co-created this together ( as well as inspired by the presence of conscious women in their lives) and are asking for feedback and suggestions. I invite you to go to the link below and tell them what you think and feel after reading the “Manifesto”. There are great comments on the page already! Click here for the link and bring your voice!
As the principle of interconnectedness, inseparability, and union of Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine provides us with a continuous reminder of our relationship to the whole of creation, it is time to come together in collaborative partnership. The tasks before us as men and women, males and females, are huge indeed. Perhaps it is these very tasks that are co-creating the alignment that is being asked for between us.
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